The Albion-Marshall Resilient Communities Project (AMRCP) launched in February of 2017, with the goal of cultivating a culture of respect and dignity within the greater Albion and Marshall community, while working together to create a safe, equitable place for all to live, work, and play.

Pulitzer-Prize Winning Play ‘Sweat’ Coming to Our Area

Albion was chosen to be a part of The Public Theater’s inaugural Mobile Unit National Tour with the production of ‘Sweat,’ by Lynn Nottage and directed by Kate Whoriskey. This world-class performance will take place on Tuesday, October 9th at 7 p.m. at the Marshall Opportunity High School cafeteria (225 E. Watson Street, Albion, MI 49224). If you can, please enter the building on the south side to not disrupt the afterschool programming.

“The Sweat Mobile National Tour is our most dramatic attempt to break out of our New York bubble and speak to those who the non-profit theater has largely ignored: the rural communities of the upper Midwest,” said Artistic Director Oskar Eustis. “If the culture belongs to everyone, it belongs to the citizens of Kenosha, Erie, and Albion as much as it belongs to Manhattan. We are thrilled to be bringing Lynn Nottage’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning play across America.”

This stunning play about the collision of race, class, family and friendship, and the tragic, unintended costs of community without opportunity will show in Albion for one night only. Following the performance, there will be an opportunity to discuss the play and its connection to the local region’s historical and current issues, triumphs, and challenges. Please come, listen, and be a part of history in the making! Tickets available at http://thepublic.nyc/sweatalbion or by calling 517-960-2029.

With warm humor and tremendous heart, SWEAT tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives sharing drinks, secrets, and laughs while working together on a factory floor. But when layoffs and picket lines begin to chip away at their trust, the friends find themselves pitted against each other in the hard fight to stay afloat. It premiered in New York at The Public Theater in 2016, with critics writing about the play’s breathtaking timeliness, compassion, and power. The play opened on Broadway on March 26, 2017, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play.

“Sweat tells the story of Reading, Pennsylvania, but it could be any post-industrial city across the landscape,” said Playwright Lynn Nottage. “One of the beautiful things about what we’re trying to do with the Mobile Unit National Tour is to link narratives and bring people not just in the communities into dialogue, but people across communities into dialogue and figure out how can we strategize and shift the national conversation.”

With its inaugural production of SWEAT, The Public’s MOBILE UNIT NATIONAL will increase the reach of the current Mobile Unit program in New York and strengthen The Public’s commitment to belief that theater belongs to all by producing world-class productions in partnership with community partners nationwide. For more information, please visit thepublic.nyc/mobilenational.

ABOUT THE PUBLIC THEATER:

THE PUBLIC is theater of, by, and for all people. Artist-driven, radically inclusive, and fundamentally democratic, The Public continues the work of its visionary founder Joe Papp as a civic institution engaging, both on-stage and off, with some of the most important ideas and social issues of today. Conceived over 60 years ago as one of the nation’s first nonprofit theaters, The Public has long operated on the principles that theater is an essential cultural force and that art and culture belong to everyone. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Executive Director Patrick Willingham, The Public’s wide breadth of programming includes an annual season of new work at its landmark home at Astor Place, Free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, The Mobile Unit touring throughout New York City’s five boroughs and across the country, Public Forum, Under the Radar, Public Studio, Public Works, Public Shakespeare Initiative, and Joe’s Pub. Since premiering HAIR in 1967, The Public continues to create the canon of American Theater and is currently represented on Broadway by the Tony Award-winning musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Their programs and productions can also be seen regionally across the country and around the world. The Public has received 59 Tony Awards, 170 Obie Awards, 53 Drama Desk Awards, 54 Lortel Awards, 32 Outer Critic Circle Awards, 13 New York Drama Desk Awards, and 6 Pulitzer Prizes. More info at publictheater.org

MOBILE UNIT NATIONAL is made possible by the Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

THE MOBILE UNIT is made possible with the support of Stavros Niarchos Foundation, The Tow Foundation, The McLaughlin Children’s Trust, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and JetBlue Airways. Additional support provided by Open Society Foundation, Susan & David Edelstein and The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. The Luesther T. Mertz Charitable Trust provides leadership support for The Public Theater’s year-round activities.

BIOS

LYNN NOTTAGE (Playwright) is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and a screenwriter whose work has been produced widely in the U.S. and throughout the world. Most recently, her play Sweat (Susan Smith Blackburn Award, OSF American Revolution Cycle Commission) appeared at The Public Theater and on Broadway, winning the Pulitzer Prize. Her other plays include Mlima’s Tale; By The Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lilly Award, Drama Desk nom.); Ruined (Pulitzer Prize, Obie, Lortel, NY Drama Critics’ Circle, Audelco, Drama Desk, and OCC Award); Intimate Apparel (American Theatre Critics and NYDCC Awards); Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (Obie);Crumbs from the Table of Joy. She recently produced and conceived of This Is Reading, a multi-media performance installation at the Franklin Street Railroad Station in Reading, PA. Nottage was a producer/director on the Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It” and co-founder of Market Road Films. Nottage is the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Master Dramatist Award, Doris Duke Artist Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, Steinberg “Mimi” Distinguished Playwright Award, Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize, and Lee Reynolds Award. Her other honors include the National Black Theatre Fest’s August Wilson Playwriting Award, a Guggenheim Grant, Lucille Lortel Fellowship, and Visiting Research Fellowship at Princeton University. She is an Associate Professor at Columbia School of the Arts. She is an artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory, a member of the Dramatists Guild and The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

KATE WHORISKEY (Director). Her New York credits include The Public and Broadway productions of Sweat, Ping Pong, and Manahatta at The Public’s Public Studio, Tales from Red Vienna and Ruined at MTC (Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel nominations), The Miracle Worker (Broadway’s Circle in the Square), How I Learned to Drive (Second Stage), The Piano Teacher (Vineyard Theatre), Oroonoko (Theatre for A New Audience), world premieres of Fabulation and Inked Baby (Playwrights Horizons), and Massacre at the Labyrinth Theatre. Internationally she has directed Magdalena at the Chatelet Theatre in Paris and Teatro Municipal de Sao Paolo. Regionally she has directed at The Goodman, The Geffen, American Repertory Theatre, The Shakespeare Theatre, The Huntington, South Coast Rep, Baltimore Center Stage, Sundance Theatre Lab, New York Stage and Film, among others.